Turnbull nodded. "As I said, your letters got me worrying. I knew you must be on to something or you wouldn't have been so positive. So I started checking on all the data about the City—especially that which had come in just previous to the time you sent the letters.
"I found that several new artifacts had been discovered in Sector Nine of the City—in the part they call the Bank Buildings. That struck a chord in my memory, so I looked back over the previous records. That Sector was supposed to have been cleaned out nearly ninety years ago.
"The error I made was in thinking that you had been forcibly abducted somehow—that you had been forced to write that third letter. It certainly looked like it, since I couldn't see any reason for you to hide anything from me.
"I didn't think you'd be in on anything as underhanded as this looked, so I assumed that you were acting against your will."
Scholar Rawlings smiled. "But you thought I was capable of underhanded tactics? That's not very flattering, young man."
Turnbull grinned. "I thought you were capable of kidnaping a man. Was I wrong?"
Rawlings laughed heartily. "Touché.Go on."
"Since artifacts had been found in a part of the City from which they had previously been removed, I thought that Jim, here, had found a ... well, a cover-up. It looked as though some of the alien machines were being moved around in order to conceal the fact that someone was keeping something hidden. Like, for instance, a new weapon, or a device that would give a man more power than he should rightfully have."
"Such as?" Duckworth asked.
"Such as invisibility, or a cheap method of transmutation, or even a new and faster space drive. I wasn't sure, but it certainly looked like it might be something of that sort."
Rawlings nodded thoughtfully. "A very good intuition, considering the fact that you had a bit of erroneous data."
"Exactly. I thought that Rawlings Scientific Corporation—or else you, personally—were concealing something from the rest of us and from the Advisory Board. I thought that Scholar Duckworth had found out about it and that he'd been kidnaped to hush him up. It certainly looked that way."
"I must admit it did, at that," Duckworth said. "But tell me—how does it look now?"
Turnbull frowned. "The picture's all switched around now. You came here for a purpose—to check up on your own data. Tell me, is everything here on the level?"
Duckworth paused before he answered. "Everythinghuman," he said slowly.
"That's what I thought," said Turnbull. "If the human factor is eliminated—at least partially—from the data, the intuition comes through quite clearly. We're being fed information."
Duckworth nodded silently.
Rawlings said: "That's it. Someone or something is adding new material to the City. It's like some sort of cosmic bird-feeding station that has to be refilled every so often."
Turnbull looked down at his big hands. "It never was a trade route focus," he said. "It isn't even a city, in our sense of the term, no more than a birdhouse is a nest." He looked up. "That city was built for only one purpose—to give human beings certain data. And it's evidently data that we need in a hurry, for our own good."
"How so?" Rawlings asked, a look of faint surprise on his face.
"Same analogy. Why does anyone feed birds? Two reasons—either to study and watch them, or to be kind to them. You feed birds in the winter because they might die if they didn't get enough food."
"Maybe we're being studied and watched, then," said Duckworth, probingly.
"Possibly. But we won't know for a long time—if ever."
Duckworth grinned. "Right. I've seen this City. I've looked it over carefully in the past few months. Whatever entities built it are so far ahead of us that we can't even imagine what it will take to find out anything about them. We are as incapable of understanding them as a bird is incapable of understanding us."
"Who knows about this?" Turnbull asked suddenly.
"The entire Advanced Study Board at least," said Rawlings. "We don't know how many others. But so far as we know everyone who has been able to recognize what is really going on at the City has also been able to realize that it is something that the human raceen masseis not yet ready to accept."
"What about the technicians who are actually working there?" asked Turnbull.
Rawlings smiled. "The artifacts are very carefully replaced. The technicians—again, as far as we know—have accepted the evidence of their eyes."
Turnbull looked a little dissatisfied. "Look, there are plenty of people in the galaxy who would literally hate the idea that there is anything in the universe superior to Man. Can you imagine the storm of reaction that would hit if this got out? Whole groups would refuse to have anything to do with anything connected with the City. The Government would collapse, since the whole theory of our present government comes from City data. And the whole work of teaching intuitive reasoning would be dropped like a hot potato by just those very people who need to learn to use it.
"And it seems to me that some precautions—" He stopped, then grinned rather sheepishly. "Oh," he said, "I see."
Rawlings grinned back. "There's never any need to distort the truth. Anyone who is psychologically incapable of allowing the existence of beings more powerful than Man is also psychologically incapable of piecing together the clues which would indicate the existence of such beings."
Scholar Duckworth said: "It takes a great deal of humility—a real feeling of honest humility—to admit that one is actually inferior to someone—or something—else. Most people don't have it—they rebel because they can't admit their inferiority."
"Like the examples of the North American Amerindian tribes." Turnbull said. "They hadn't reached the state of civilization that the Aztecs or Incas had. They were incapable of allowing themselves to be beaten and enslaved—they refused to allow themselves to learn. They fought the white man to the last ditch—and look where they ended up."
"Precisely," said Duckworth. "While the Mexicans and Peruvians today are a functioning part of civilization—because theycouldanddidlearn."
"I'd just as soon the human race didn't go the way of the Amerindians," Turnbull said.
"I have a hunch it won't," Scholar Rawlings said. "The builders of the City, whoever they are, are edging us very carefully into the next level of civilization—whatever it may be. At that level, perhaps we'll be able to accept their teaching more directly."
Duckworth chuckled. "Before we can become gentlemen, we have to realize that we arenotgentlemen."
Turnbull recognized the allusion. There is an old truism to the effect that a barbarian can never learn what a gentleman is because a barbarian cannot recognize that he isn't a gentleman. As soon as he recognizes that fact, he ceases to be a barbarian. He isnotautomatically a gentleman, but at least he has become capable of learning how to be one.
"The City itself," said Rawlings, "acts as a pretty efficient screening device for separating the humble from the merely servile. The servile man resents his position so much that he will fight anything which tries to force recognition of his position on him. The servile slave is convinced that he is equal to or superior to his masters, and that he is being held down by brute force. So he opposes them with brute force and is eventually destroyed."
Turnbull blinked. "A screening device?" Then, like a burst of sunlight, the full intuition came over him.
Duckworth's round face was positively beaming. "You're the first one ever to do it," he said. "In order to become a member of the Advanced Study Board, a scholar must solve that much of the City's secret by himself. I'm a much older man than you, and I just solved it in the past few months.
"You will be the first Ph.D. to be admitted to the Board while you're working on your scholar's degree. Congratulations."
Turnbull looked down at his big hands, a pleased look on his face. Then he looked up at Scholar Duckworth. "Got a cigarette, Jim? Thanks. You know, we've still got plenty of work ahead of us, trying to find out just what it is that the City builders want us to learn."
Duckworth smiled as he held a flame to the tip of Turnbull's cigarette.
"Who knows?" he said quietly. "Hell, maybe they want us to learn aboutthem!"